Watching George McGovern Run

Senator George McGovern died this morning, aged ninety, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s probably inevitable that he’ll be remembered for losing to Richard Nixon, in 1972. But he’ll also be remembered for his personality, which was unusual for a politician. McGovern embodied two qualities that rarely exist in combination: passion and circumspection. Many Americans, including his constituents in South Dakota, found his politics too liberal. But they admired his personality, and voted for him anyway.

In the sixties, it seemed to many people that they had to choose sides. Were you for revolution and radicalism, or for crew-cut “law and order”? In either case, your political convictions were going to get hopelessly tangled up with other things, like the way you spoke or dressed. It was easy to feel trapped by a conflict between your politics and your personality. McGovern’s ideas were substantive, but he was also appealing because he seemed to cut across categories. He wasn’t the type of person you expected to say the types of things he said. In a 1968 Talk of the Town story, written soon after McGovern had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination, The New Yorker described McGovern as

a calm, quiet, friendly, open, unself-conscious man. He speaks thoughtfully but without hesitation, in a rather flat Western voice…. He is a plain man, and he projects an air of old-fashioned integrity and decency.

It was in this calm but unhesitating tone that he said that Vietnam was “the most disastrous political, moral, diplomatic blunder in our national history,” and called for an end to the draft. He was, in some ways, an ideal liberal: progressive and informed (he had been a history professor before entering politics), but in no way coastal or élite (his father had been a Methodist minister). The New Yorker followed McGovern to a taping of “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. Outside the studio, “a person might easily have been stabbed in the ankle by a sharply pointed Italian shoe (with a buckle), all the trousers were cuffless and trim, and there was a forest of sideburns.” McGovern arrived looking like a visitor from another America, “wearing a dark-blue South Dakota suit with flapping cuffs.” Then, on stage, he came out against Vietnam, and spoke about “the tragic conditions in our inner cities… those who have lost faith… those who cannot get jobs.”

His affect was simple, unhesitating, and, therefore, reassuring. But he could get angry, too. In 1970, McGovern co-authored a bill with a Republican, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, which would have used a funding maneuver to force American withdrawal from Vietnam. He took out a second mortgage on his home to pay for a television fund-raiser for the bill, then used the money he raised to pay for a public-relations campaign. Eventually, the bill drew broad public support. In the end, it failed to pass—but not before McGovern, frustrated, had told his Senate colleagues that

this chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes…. If we do not end this damnable war, those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

This speech, and others like it, offended some people and greatly impressed others. His old-fashioned decency could be read another way: as quiet determination. In 1971, McGovern announced that he would seek the nomination a second time. In a Profile of the Senator from January of 1972, James Stevenson wrote the usual: that McGovern seemed “as straight as the road from Faith, South Dakota, to Mud Butte (Route 212, thirty-eight miles),” that he “appears so plainly honest, kind, sincere, and good that he makes people feel rotten by comparison.” But he also pointed out that McGovern had “the calm assurance of a veteran pilot (he flew B-24s in thirty-five missions for the Fifteenth Air Force in the Second World War).” He had “commitment,” Stevenson wrote, and had been speaking out against Vietnam since 1963. A Talk of the Town piece from June of 1972 struck a similar note. McGovern visited the Garment District, where he spoke at a rally. The usual McGovern equanimity was in evidence: “He was relaxed and calm, and his calm seemed to spread to people around him.” But that calm, everyone knew, was only part of the story. McGovern, The New Yorker wrote, was “like the eye of a hurricane, without the hurricane.”

McGovern, of course, lost disastrously: the delegate count was five hundred and twenty to seventeen. The country lost, too: during the weeks leading up to McGovern’s Garment District rally, Nixon’s operatives had been breaking into Watergate. Looking back, what’s most incredible is that voters could have been so profoundly mistaken about the characters of the two candidates. McGovern lost in part because he took many positions which Americans were unwilling to support, like amnesty for those who had dodged the draft and a guaranteed minimum income for poor Americans. But Nixon was also successful in tarring McGovern as a wild-eyed, untrustworthy maniac committed to “amnesty, abortion, and acid.” McGovern may or may not have been right for the Presidency—he may have been, ultimately, a little too unique—but he was no maniac. After the Garment District rally, McGovern met with community leaders at a nearby Dubrow’s cafeteria. He ordered a chopped-liver sandwich and sat at a table surrounded by onlookers, including a Talk reporter from The New Yorker. “As the candidate was finishing his sandwich,” the reporter wrote, “someone called out, ‘Hey, McGovern, you’re a mensch!’ ”

The candidate turned to one of his table companions. “Abrams,” he said, “what is a mensch?”